Hints and tips:
...I have a miniature Australian shepherd called Siegfried, named after the Wagner opera, though most people think of Siegfried & Roy....
...What a fabled Siegmund he was in Wagner’s Die Walküre. What a romantic idol he made in Werther, just as Goethe and Massenet must have imagined....
...After two months given over almost entirely to Wagner’s Ring cycle, the Royal Opera season is at last fully under way. ★★★☆☆ To December 10, roh.org.uk...
...As with Isolde, the final word is left to Coss amid multiple corpses, as Wagner-like motifs emerge from the orchestra. To January 17, lyricopera.org...
...By casting Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson as the work’s passionate young lovers, the festival has opted for crowd-pleasing names rather than artistic truth....
...The soprano Renée Fleming made her first opera recording with Opera Rara. With their latest rediscovery, I think they have struck gold....
...Renée Fleming, captured a little late in the same production (2009), gives one of her more involving performances, with Joseph Calleja an equally affecting Alfredo....
...They booked Renée Fleming to sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs, always an audience favourite and one of the sought-after American soprano’s signature pieces. The concert packed them in....
...Narrative convolutions notwithstanding, the opera has had some illustrious champions, including Berlioz, Meyerbeer and Wagner....
...Dvorák Rusalka Jirí Belohlávek Glyndebourne Festival Opera (3 CDs) Wagner Götterdämmerung Mark Elder Hallé (5 CDs) On the surface Dvorák’s fairy-tale and Wagner’s Ring finale have little in common...
...A star singer is crucial these days and this year it was the turn of Renée Fleming to deliver the glamour quota....
...Perhaps it takes Franco-Italo-Belgian forces to illuminate a form that, as the visiting Wagner mischievously noted, the British attended as piously as if they were in church....
...Surrounded by hints of 1903 scenery and ably supported by Thomas Hampson as Amfortas, our hero mustered a reasonable facsimile of heldentenor prowess as Wagner’s Parsifal....
...You could say, in a reversal of Mark Twain’s dictum on Wagner, he makes the music sound better than it is. www.teatroregio.torino.it...
...Wagner did it for the sleepy Bavarian town of Bayreuth in the 19th century; Mozart and Strauss did it for Salzburg in the early years of the 20th century; and, in recent decades, Rossini has done it for...
...After all, the orchestra in Wagner’s music dramas is the main role....
...A Sellars Mozart festival was never going to include an invitation to Renée Fleming to sing a selection of her favourite arias. Why, I ask, is he dreaming of another world?...
...This over-achieving maestro may fumble through Verdi and Wagner, but he knows his way around Tchaikovsky. Verdi should get his due later that month with a revival of “Simon Boccanegra”....
...Look up “prone to anti-Semitism” in the dictionary and you will find his picture next to Wagner and Borat. “Famous Catholic ex-alcoholics”: well, the list is legion....
...Tired-but-still- true award: To Ben Heppner in Wagner and Beethoven. Finest flirters: Olga Borodina and Ildar Abdrazakov surveying Rossini’s Algiers....
...The rehashing of repertoire for the likes of Placido Domingo and Renee Fleming distorts the market....
...Such is the logic behind the marketing of Cecilia Bartoli, Renee Fleming and Angela Gheorghiu, all of them high-earning classical singers who have learned to use PR to their benefit....
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